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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this work better in the context of personalized recommendations? Pandora is scarily good at this because it's an offshoot of the Music Genome Project, which analyzes the constituent parts of music (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project?wprov=sfl... )

It combines that with your personal things up and listening history and predicts what other songs you yourself are likely to enjoy.

By contrast, up votes from strangers across genres seems unlikely to match your personal tastes.

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I don't think you'll be able to compete with Spotify for personal recommendations. But there's a fatigue that comes with being kept in your recommendation bubble. I want to hear something new and good and different! And not corporate-approved like Pitchfork (rip). Through the grace of god Hype Machine is still running and still highlighting some solid tracks.

Strangers' preferences can be better than a personalized recommendation, if they are cool strangers.

Last edit: I seem to remember a study that concluded that people who listened to a wider range of music types spent more money, or were more lucrative advertising targets. However, there are fewer of those kinds of listeners.

Maybe because by "wider range" many people understand whatever the trendy stations will feed them - from rap to dad rock, r&b or pop, so they behave as a captive audience? My Spotify must have a reason for always trying to feed me Coldplay although I swear I never (actively) listened to anything from them.

Genre filters are coming, once we have enough tracks live. What we want to do it give artists and music lovers a place to discover talent outside of what might be served up for them by algos. If the community likes a track enough it will rise to the top and get in-front of more ears that might not have discovered it otherwise.

I tried Pandora once, it just played me music that was a bit like the music I liked, but worse. If the music were better I'd already have known about it

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